ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

August 12, 2020

Punk Rocker (HEDZ)

HEDZ is a game in which a species of time travelling aliens harvest humans over the course of centuries to...

Hold up. Are we SURE this isn't still Body Harvest? No? Just a weird coincidence? Alrighty then.

So yeah, time travelling aliens - only this time, you're playing the alien perspective. The humans are harvested not for resources, but for sport - see, these big headed purple bastards can wear the heads of the humans they've harvested like masks, granting them special abilities that they use to beat each other up in an arena setting. Well okay fine, it's just an excuse plot, but the head gimmick is probably the best thing about the game because you're incentivized to collect them from other combatants, and each of them has a different technique and different stats - like a hero shooter before hero shooters hero shootered. And although many of them are variations of a smaller list of attacks, the heads manage to be surprisingly diverse in spite of it, from tennis players that lob explosive balls to protesters that throw molotovs to scientists that throw light bulbs and even an old granny that spits out their dentures like a wire guided rocket. There's a dizzying number of them and they get progressively crazier and more able as the game goes on, although the pregame interface for selecting them could stand to be a hell of a lot less cluttered.

Playing it, however, is an entirely different story. There's a good game in here somewhere, but good lord is it unbelievably clunky to play. It comes from the old old school Doom style of shooter design, where strafing was handled by a toggle button instead of having individual keys for strafing left and right, and mouselook still wasn't a thing, serving no other purpose than to turn your character which the arrow keys already did. Back then it might have sufficed, but it's a method of control that has aged terribly since - and considering we had Quake before this, it was already dated by the time it came out. Graphically speaking it was weird and inconsistent too, where the bodies of characters were crisp and flat polygons but the heads were strange, pixellated blobs that I'm not convinced weren't just sprites with a metric shit ton of rotation frames.

It's a game I genuinely wish I could go back to and give another chance, but it's one of... THOSE kinds of Windows games. You know the one - too early for modern systems to know how to run, but too late to have any conventional means of just emulating it. It's a goddamn shame, because I never finished it back in the day and on some level I still love the concept of it, not to mention it's pretty much the perfect candidate for a randomizer that I know it would never get just for its unpopularity and obscurity,

Speaking of randomizers, though...

August 13, 2020

The Hero of Time (Ocarina of Time)

Yep, you all knew this was coming eventually. If you ever owned an N64, this was one of about 2-3 games that nearly every single owner of the system was guaranteed to have - and unlike Sonic 2 all the way back from the Genesis, not even because it was a pack-in with the system itself. Ocarina of Time is fucking legendary as far as games go, and it serves no purpose to claim otherwise - it was popular, it played great, looked phenomenal for its day, and is even the origin of most of the commonly used musical leimotifs still in the series today. And once again, that makes the game difficult to comment on, because most of what I say is just going to be preaching to the choir anyway - almost all of you already know it's held in very high regard, even those among you that claim it's excessively so. So instead, I'm going to single out a thing or two that I appreciate on a more personal level.

Let's start with the combat. It's still by and large my favourite combat in the entire series, even comparing it alongside Wind Waker's or Breath of the WIld's. And this goes back to a stance I establish all the way back during Wonder Boy - it's a simple system that knows its limits extremely well, and diversifies its fighting by making movement and location an important part of fighting many enemies in the game. Ocarina of Time establishes this pretty early on with the use of jump attacks, where some (Deku Babas) are much easier to approach with jumping swings than regular ones, whereas others (Giant Skulltulas) punished you if you ran into them while performing it, prompting you to carefully measure out the apex of your swing. This is to say nothing about dancing around enemy attacks with the options the game gives you. And unlike many later games, OoT doesn't deal with unnecessary fluff like scripted combos from button mashing - single strikes are enough to turn the tide of most fights, and the game doesn't maintain any pretense of needing more than that. You hold a direction and press attack, and Link swings in that direction. That's all there is to it.

I'm not going to pretend for a second that it couldn't be improved apon. A lot of it is little things innate to being an early 3D title, like certain measures of jank and camera weirdness, a framerate capped at 20fps, and a seemingly constant need to switch items in certain dungeons even after having three entire buttons dedicated to them. There's two big ones of note in OoT though, one all encompassing and one localized. The former would have to be the game's aiming system, of which Z targetting often feels like was invented to keep you from using it as much as humanly possible. Actually shifting your aim is frustrating because there's a massive deadzone around the stick's neutral position, but actually aiming moves your view around in big, jerky movements even if done a single frame at a time, so actually getting a precise shot on a distant object - which you'll need to do a LOT of once you get the Longshot - is way harder than it has any right to be.

The latter is, of course, the Water Dungeon - more specifically, the Iron Boots which are needed to complete it. One of the big gimmicks of the dungeon, besides the ability to change the water level, is requiring you to alternate Link between wearing and not wearing the Iron Boots in order to sink or rise in the water respectively and using that mobility to reach areas in the dungeon you couldn't ordinarily. The thing is, the Iron Boots aren't treated as an item in this game, but an equipment, so to equip them you have to open the pause menu, scroll two panels away from your items screen and change from your normal boots to them. You need to do this every single fucking time you decide you need to sink or swim, and it gets fucking annoying really goddamn quick.

Oh yeah, about that randomizer.

It's pretty fuckin cool yo

It's the only randomizer I still play semi-regularly these days, and I find it facinating how much more life it's breathed into the game for me and how much it makes you rethink the way you treat certain items - where depending on your settings, bomb bags are god, a game-critical item could just be some random-ass gold skulltula or an otherwise forgettable chest in a shallow grave, and as it turns out, some problems have more solutions than they were even designed for. Did you know you could use the hover boots to cross the quicksand in Gerudo Desert? Or that the Boomerang can retreive heart pieces? I sure fucking didn't! Once again, it's a testament to the open-ness of the game that you can take it apart and put it together with only a few caveats, and the game will still be playable from start to finish. It also has dedicated buttons for the Ocarina and the Hover/Iron boots, which is what they should've fucking been in the first place aaaaugh

August 14, 2020

Beavis and Butthead (for Gameboy)

Much like Donkey Kong Land, this is another one of those titles that only made the list because it had a single absurd flaw to make it stand out. That's not to say it would've been a good game otherwise - good lord no, it's overwhelmingly boring even when it's working as intended. It's a top-down perspective game where you're frequently stopped from progressing to the end of a given segment by some completely arbitary fetch quest, and there's really no overarching narrative at all besides what's pertinent at the time so the game never really feels like it establishes any sense of structure or flow at all. Say what you will about the show's writing, but at least every episode was held together by a single theme, and even other games made with the license (such as the Genesis port) still had a long term goal to work towards admist all the otherwise unrelated shenanigans. You know when a licensed game is released and you can tell almost nobody responsible for the original show or movie had any meaningful part in it? This is definitely one of those games.

So what's the BIG problem? For starters, it's a Gameboy game with password saves, which is even worse than when they're done on a console because you need to bring your notes with you in order to continue a game on the go. That's still not the issue. The issue is the way this game handles weapons. They have infinite ammo, but they're effectively interchangable and you can only acquire them at two points throughout the entire game - once right at the very start, and once somewhere roughly in the middle. You're probably asking "well if they have no ammo limits then what's the problem"? The problem is that password saves do not save your fucking weapons. Whenever you load from a password, boom, completely fucking unarmed again.

This leaves you with one of four options:

1) Play the entire game in one sitting (lol)

2) Only rely on the password closest to the midgame weapon

3) Backtrack to the midgame weapon with finite resources that do not respawn, through enemies that DO respawn and often hit you unavoidably if you can't shoot them in advance (and sometimes even when you can)

4) Spend the near entrety of the game completely fucking defenseless for daring to play this like a normal videogame (LOL)

It's a gameplay quirk so moronic, you'd think Beavis programmed it. I honestly don't know why I ever bothered finishing this game. Maybe just so I knew how it finished so I never had any nagging desire to touch it ever again. Spoilers: it's a complete anticlimax. Just don't bother.

August 15, 2020

Master Hand (Super Smash Bros)

I realize I've harped on a lot about the standards of fighting games on this list so far, but Smash Brothers stands out as the exception to most of those rules. Most people, especially nowadays, remember simply for the star power of its roster, and it's difficult to argue that it doesn't factor into its popularity - it stands as one of the most ambitious crossovers of all god damned time, growing steadily more and more so with each successive entry in the series, to the point that it has singlehandedly mended old rivalries, buried hatchets and even crossed party lines in the name of gathering gaming's greatest icons all in one place. If you told me 15 years ago that there would be a fighting game where Mario, Sonic, Cloud and fuckin Terry Bogard could all be fighting each other in the same match, I'd have thought you were taking the fucking piss.

Smash would never have gotten that far though without its unique approach to fighting, offering an incredibly low barrier of entry while still keeping the same ludicrously high skill cieling that modern fighting games are best known for. See, I've already criticized the genre for dressing up cheat codes as a part of its standard controls, but that's only a part of the problem - the other part is that characters have a tendency to not even have the same cheat codes. Sure there are QCFs and double QCFs, but some characters don't even have those, and some have inputs that just make no sense at all unless used through some buffering system that's never explained to you (such as Zangief's full circle motions). Neither of these things serve any purpose at all but to foster a culture of elitism and necessitate hours apon hours reading out movesets in a training mode to be able to play a character at a bare minimum level to be considered viable, to say nothing of the level of execution you need to be able to string these motions together sometimes just a matter of frames apart. Smash sees that stereotype in action and says "no, fuck that. Everyone has the same controls, and you never have to press more than one direction and one button."

That's not to say characters are designed uniformly, or even that they're equally as simple - far from it. The meta has had... hiccups over the years, there's no doubt about that, but the roster has still been incredibly diverse in its application no matter which game you're drawing from, and Ultimate in particular is notable in that there's so many otherwise obscure character picks that have managed to stand out because of the amount of work the team had done to level the roster out. There's something for just about everyone nowadays - yes, even the people who prefer to have cheat codes sprinkled into normal gameplay. It's fucking crazy that we have characters that can fight almost exclusively with projectiles, with borderline rube goldberg machines and Fsmashes that can kill in two hits if they manage to bait someone into them, all in the same game as more mundane punchy kicky characters and characters that might not even be necessarily bipedal, and they'll all still have their own individual merits at the end of the day.

It's just unfortunate that these days I see it as a franchise that's failed to keep with the times. If you play it with people in the same room it's still fantastic, but shoddy network architecture and shockingly bad netcode have kept it from performing well anywhere else, especially now in these trying times where playing the game in person is no longer an option for much of the developed world, and for many wasn't even before we had a fucking global pandemic forcing us to stay in our homes. And honestly, it's a struggle to play Smash Ultimate for any other reason, because its singleplayer offerings have become steadily worse and worse over time - even with the push for World of Light, which turned out to be little more than a series of infuriatingly poorly designed event matches without much real connection to one another. I haven't actually played the game in any meaningful capacity since the Joker update, because a single character and a series of balance changes doesn't really do anything to draw me back to the game even when it's as monumental as Banjo fuckin' Kazooie. Was it really so hard to just bring Smash Run back? ffs

August 16, 2020

Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny (South Park '99)

Before Stick of Truth, it was honestly difficult to imagine the prospect of a good South Park game. Nobody seemed to even know what genre it should take place in, much less how to make it compete with giants of gaming like Earthworm Jim which knew how to be genuinely funny on TOP of being good to play in its own right. Even with that backdrop, though, I don't think anyone expected or wanted the first South Park game to be a first person shooter of all things. The arsenal is probably the best thing about this game though. Even the less memorable weapons are still fun, themed around toys and household implements like dodgeballs, plunger launchers and the foam dart gun. Most people remember it for the starting weapon, the snowballs, which have infinite ammo and have an altfire which throws a yellow snowball with... shall we say, a "warmup" time. If the game captures the charm of the show absolutely nowhere else, it would have to be here.

Unfortunately, this game is just repetitive as balls. The overwhelming majority of it is just mowing down the same fucking enemy for 20 minutes at a time before it allows you to progress between sections, mixing things up with the introduction of "tank" enemies, basically sub-bosses that charge for the level start and continuously spawn lesser enemies en route. If you let even one of them escape, you're shifted back to South Park itself and have to wipe out all the Tanks you left behind before they have a chance to destroy the whole town. Depending on which version you're playing on, accomplishing any of this can be either trivial to the point of mind numbing, or borderline impossible to do consistently with the limited resources they give you. I had the PC version, which leaned furthest to the latter spectrum.

Not only did the PC port physically have more enemies to kill, the developers inexplicably decided that mouse and keyboard was something that represented a balance issue and in response, multiplied the health of every fucking enemy in the game. It's not unheard of that the snowball will be your only option for many, many fights because the game literally does not give you enough fucking ammo for the amount of health you have to draw out of enemies throughout any given level, and just to take the piss even further you don't even get to keep the weapons you've gained between episodes. Which is usually exactly where you'll need them, because the closer you encounter a Tank to your spawn point, the less time you'll have to kill them before they flee, and a snowball might not even have the DPS to do it in time. This already makes the game tedious and irritating to play through the first two episodes, but further than that and the game becomes borderline (and later almost literally) unplayable because of all the health sponges the game throws at you.

For all that it's worth, the game has a surprisingly developed multiplayer mode and the PC version even has online play, not that I know a single other human being who's ever dipped their toes into it. At least there you don't have any bullshit health sponge enemies to deal with, so I imagine that's where the game's strengths would shine best. Anyone here happen to have any experience with it? I sure don't.

August 17, 2020

SOLDIER G65434-2 "Goggles" (System Shock 2)

Let me just quickly clear something up for people who weren't alive when this game came out - yes, it did already look dated even when it was a new release. Apparently there was some fear that the ambitions the developers had for the game wouldn't run very well on computers of the time - a fear that in hindsight, was completely unfounded - so they just reused the engine for Thief 1/2 instead of making a new one from scratch. It's a game that absolutely looks rough around the edges, thanks in large part to polygon counts so low you could us the sharp edges on people's faces to cut steak with. Make no mistake, though - in almost every other respect, this game is a fucking classic among both shooters and horror games, and has something to offer to players of a HUGE variety of different backgrounds thanks to its arsenal and its robust progression system.

It's probably far from the first of its kind - in fact I have a feeling it wouldn't be out of place in a traditional western RPG of its time. But it's probably the first time I ever found any investment of a system like this, and I feel like SS2's framing of the system really helps it stands out among its points of comparison. Rather than just gaining generic XP points for every enemy you kill, they're found in the world in the form of "Upgrade Modules", either in corpses and containers or given to you by Polito as a reward for making critical advances in the plot. Every time you're given some feels like an event, not only rewarding you for exploring off the beaten path and specializing in certain skills but also making you feel like you have to ration every little bit you get - because while you can become pretty powerful with the resources you're given, there absolutely is not enough to be a master of all trades in a single playthrough. These points have value in a way JRPGs consistently fail to replicate, and honestly even western role playing influences still struggle with it.

The upgrades are divided into three different general categories - Weapons, Hacking and Psi - and is once again a big part of why SS2 can hook in players from so many different demographs. If you wanted to play it like almost a straight up survival shooting game, that's absolutely an option - even if you specialize exclusively in bullet based weapons, they all have multiple different types of ammo you can interchange, most importantly armour piercing rounds to deal with mechanical enemies. But you can also turn the station's defences against your enemies and break into otherwise locked areas and crates, or build up a wide array of quirky and useful abilities through your Psi Amp, and there are often specialties within specialties that one can further use to tailor to their liking and inspire a number of self-imposed challenges even after clearing the game for the first time. I personally have managed to beat the game melee only, which was actually a surprising amount of fun all its own, and maybe someday I'll get around to doing that Psi only playthrough I've always wanted to try.

Just one thing, though.

This GUI is a fucking crime against humanity. It takes a lengthy tutorial somewhere in the 20 actual minute range to familiarize you with all the overwhelming clunkiness that this menu poses to the player, which you often won't have time to deal with if a monster sneaks up on you while you're organizing inventory or your gun jams in the middle of a firefight (yes, you have to perform maintainence on your guns to keep them in working condition. That's a feature). So a big part of functioning well in this game at all is remembering as many hotkeys as possible to bypass this stupid fucking interface completely - and for some facets of it even THAT isn't an option. It's crazy to think that this is still a genuine, honest to god improvement over System Shock 1, which felt less like controlling a person and more like a fucking piece of construction equipment with a gun attached to it. Once you're past the menu system though? Fucking incredible game. You'll probably have played games inspired by it sometime before, but the original is still easily worth returning to over and over again

August 18, 2020

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem: Zero Hour)

Yeah yeah, I know - this is the third Duke I've done already. Normally when I get several games of the same franchise, I would take the opportunity to sprite a supporting character instead, or bundle them together with a previous game in the series when they're similar enough to draw direct comparisons (like I did for Duke I and II). But for better or worse, Duke is the only real character in any of his games. Even in games where he has full fledged conversations with other human beings, like this one, they're just incidental NPCs to give off exposition when Duke himself can't. And Zero Hour is such a different beast to Duke 3D and the first two Dukes that I can't group it together with anything else. So I guess I don't have a choice but to give it its own sprite and its own entry! Sorry about that. Hopefully it won't happen too often.

As usual, I have to give a shout out to this game's arsenal - even though it has almost nothing in common with Duke 3D, these guys always seem to find a way to make their weapons just cool as all hell. Relevant tangent - you guys remember manuals? Those little paper leaflets that used to come with console games? I dunno what it is, but the vocabulary they use to describe these weapons made them sound fucking vicious, sometimes moreso than they actually are. Like the Gamma Cannon firing searing laser blasts, or the SMGs pumping bullets into targets at a horrendous rate of fire. And I honestly miss that kind of language? Most games these days describe their weapons in terms of stats and DPS, and even though it's more factually correct, it's also fucking boring. Can't you guys meet in the middle or something? Uh anyway, weapons. Yeah, they're cool. Balance is sorta all over the fucking place, honestly - sniper rifles can two shot a player, and I've seen rockets take you down to around 12 health from near full, but they're imaginative and diverse all the same, which I hold in much higher regard. It's just a shame that the controls hold them back.

Full disclosure, this is a third person shooter made on the N64, and unlike Goldeneye didn't make any concessions for its fucking mongoloid trident of a controller - playing like a twin stick FPS, in spite of the fact that the N64 only has one stick. There are a lot of control presets that mix up what the stick and C-buttons do, and the best one is probably using C to move and the stick to aim, but even that still feels awkward compared to other shooters of its day, nevermind the standards of today. There aren't any shortcuts for picking specific guns, only to scroll one by one through a list. And yes, that can very well get you killed if you happen to have the wrong gun equipped at the wrong time and need time to panic scroll to something more appropriate for the situation. And there can be a LOT of them for any given scenario, adding extra fumbling time every time you pick up a new one. Even by its own merits, Zero Hour feels clunky for seemingly arbitary reasons, like an autoaim that uncontrollably snaps to and from enemies unpredictably enough to consistently miss important shotgun blasts, and for some reason jumping from a stationary position causes Duke to squat for an entire second first before actually jumping even though his running jump is instant??? It might not sound like much without holding a controller and playing it yourself, but this strange inconsistency can AND WILL cause you to die during critical jumping sequnces.

Yeah, about that - this game is also brutal and unforgiving to play, one of those "tHe DaRk SoUlS oF" kinds of games. Certain enemies and hazards can deal ludicrous amounts of damage to you that is difficult to avoid entirely, and yes, instant kills like death pits and crushers aren't unheard of. But any given level in Zero Hour is a grueling slog, many requiring a good 20 minutes each on a GOOD day to finish safely. That's 20 minutes per level, mind you, without a single god damn midlevel checkpoint. It's very much the Hitman school of difficulty design, where you have to complete long stretches of level in mind of facets of it you can't anticpate without having already played it, with the distinction that it doesn't have a clever sounding solution that makes you feel good for figuring it out when you eventually do. I have a soft spot for this game, as I do many Duke games, but I still have to acknowledge that shit would never fly today. Many people can't even clear the second level because it represents such a massive difficulty spike from the first, and very much forms a perfect representation of just how much shit this game is willing to throw at you to keep you from progressing.

Take my advice on this one - if you wanna play it today, play it with savestates. Preferably figure out how to play it with keyboard and mouse while you're at it?

August 19, 2020

Pikachu (Pokemon Yellow / Gold)

It always did puzzle me how Pikachu became the mascot of this series. You can only find them in two places in their game of origin, and the earliest chance you get of finding one is a mere five percent chance per encounter. Meanwhile the one they DID intend to be a series mascot (Clefairy) faded into relative obscurity pretty quickly. How the shit did that come about? It can't have been just the anime alone, right?

As far as JRPGs go, Pokemon stands out among many reasons because your party is never set in stone. Granted, there are some specific picks that benefit you more at the earliest stages (probably most infamously in Gen 1's first gym, which specializes in Pokemon that resist nearly all attacks commonly found in that region), but the franchise as a whole has made a big deal of appealing more to the player's tastes and living with the hand they're dealt, as well as collecting a wide variety of them to keep your options open. Of the games I've played, the level progression is pretty well balanced - it's not uncommon for a boss-tier trainer to have a pokemon 5-10 levels above yours, but that's usually because it forms the centrepiece of their team and can't withstand an assault from several well-balanced Pokemon of your own.

However, I find that the overarching messages of Pokemon fall apart very quickly once you dip into the competitive scene. Not only are a relatively small number of Pokemon considered viable in serious matchups, it even comes down to a relatively small number of variations of those specific Pokemon. Getting a good team together these days has devolved into an absolute shit show of breeding googleplex amounts of eggs out of Pokemon and then throwing them away immediately after hatching them if they aren't born with a very specific set of skills that you can't change any other way. Isn't it super fucked up to proclaim a message of "any choice can be good with persistence and a bit of love", and then actively fucking encourage people to abandon them by the hundreds when they don't have the exact stats they want? Nevermind that the bestiary is unbalanced as it is - I CAN understand the difficulty in that, considering they've got to be approaching quadruple digits by now - but the overall effectiveness of a specific Pokemon being determined by how they're born and not what you can train them to do goes against basically their entire fucking narrative, not to mention forms a barrier to competitive play that has no business being there. That was the exact moral being taught by the first movie all the way back in fucking 1999, for crying out loud.

For the longest time, the Pokemon franchise to me has been in a state of stagnation - much like Sonic, knowing they can get away with just about anything as long as people keep buying into them and don't question it too much. And don't think for a second that this is me jumping on the Sword/Shield hatewagon, because this is a stance I've held since Diamond and Pearl. Almost the only real major changes Pokemon seems to demonstrate between games is an increase in roster, in fact in more recent years it's even fallen into the very same "make up a game-specific gimmick and disguise it as progress" trap that Sonic has ever since Heroes. If Gamefreak doesn't stop being lazy and bother to get their shit together, sooner or later this whole thing is going to crash and burn spectacularly, and they're not going to know what to do with themselves when it happens.

August 20, 2020

Diddy Kong (Donkey Kong 64)

DK64 will forever live in infamy as the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to the concept of collectathon platformers. It's not to say that the game is absolutely awful per se - even with the Expansion Pak required just to make the game function it still drops frames on the regular, and the controls for Diddy's jetpack here are some of the absolute worst I've ever experienced out of any flying mechanic ever, but it's otherwise mechanically solid, just not on the level of Rare's other classics like Banjo Kazooie. Having progress gated off by an arbitary amount of collectibles is entirely expected for the genre, but this game goes way the fuck too far with it, adding on layers apon layers apon fucking layers of collectibles that all have near-equal billing and are somehow all equally as tedious to collect for reasons that absolutely didn't need to exist besides padding of the most blatant nature.

Let's start with regular-ass bananas. Yes, normal fucking bananas are collectibles in this game - there is exactly 500 of them in every single level and they never respawn, primarily because you are required to collect large amounts of them to unlock the boss of that given level. Even just collecting them is a pain in the ass because they're colour coded to one of the five playable Kongs in this game, and you can't pick up bananas if they don't belong to the one you've currently selected. And because you can't just switch your character on demand, this often means constantly backtracking to a tag barrel and retracing your steps over the same route over and over again just to make sure you leave no bananas abandoned along the way. Sometimes you might not even be able to do THAT because you need character specific abilities or weapons to reach them, which you have to pay with in coins. COINS WHICH ARE ALSO FUCKING INDIVIDUALLY COLOUR CODED.

Golden Bananas form this game's equivalent of Banjo's Jiggys, acting as keys for the aformentioned level gating. But it's rare to ever reach them in a straightforward manner, taking place in setpieces that again, only individual characters can reach, through timed sequences that force you to backtrack and redo them if you fail, and later even fucking forced stealth sequences. But the worst of the worst would have to be the minigames, most commonly in the form of "WELCOME TO BONUS STAGE" barrels. Having a game venture briefely into another genre as a bonus isn't unheard of, but DK64 is just fucking relentless with these, almost every bit as common as the ones in Super Bonk without the bonus of being intelligently designed around the game's core mechanics, or even the ability to just skip them if you're sick of them - because once again, you NEED the golden bananas they give just to progress, and sooner or later you're going to have to play them whether you want to or not.

Once you get past those, plus banana fairies, boss keys, guns, character specific abilities and upgrades for all involved, you're good right? FUCKIN NOPE, DK64 still finds ways to screw you over. Right before the absolute final boss of the game, K.Rool nopes out like a bitch and leaves you with a locked door emblazoned with two logos - a Rareware one and a Nintendo one. As it turns out, these are ALSO collectible items you need to have in order to unlock it. One is all the way back in a factory about a third of the way into the game, which requires a lot of character specific contorting to power on and play an arcade cabinet of the original Donkey Kong, which boots you out and forces you to take another good 30-40 seconds to boot back up again if you die even once, and then to do it again on a more difficult arranged version of the stages, again without losing a single life (context - this game's still pretty hard even with multiple lives). The other coin is in a port of Jetpac, one of Rare's earliest titles, but Cranky won't even let you play it unless you have a certain number of banana medals, which you might not have even heard of yet much less have any of because they require you to collect 75 of a character's specific bananas in a given stage, so you have to go back through previous levels and grind for these just for the ABILITY to play for the other coin and consequently, the ability to finish the entire game at all.

It's all just jumping through hoops to jump through other fucking hoops, and it devolves into tedium real quickly. It's definitely a game that could have benefited from a lot of streamlining, and removal of all those god awful fucking minigames. At the very least just the ability to change characters whenever you want to so you don't have to constantly backtrack and retrack to collect bananas. How is it that there isn't a romhack to do that yet?

August 21, 2020

I might have mentioned earlier that FPS games were turning into an arms race. It's about around this time that it started to come to a head - for the first time in gaming history, iD software had not just one but several direct competitors that could actually give them a run for their money. It also needs to be said that the internet was still in its relative infancy at this stage, and communities were in a tribal state of being that they wouldn't grow out of until decades later. It wasn't enough to like all of these games equally, or even to like more than one - buying one of these games was like being drafted into an online war, where you had to express vitriol towards competing games, because admitting they had positive traits was seen as giving ground to them. It sounds fucking stupid today, yes, but I wanted to put into context the state of communities back then - and this being a Sonic forum, there's like an 80% chance you've either experienced or participated in this kind of tribalism yourselves thanks to Sega's own marketing efforts.

That being said? Team Unreal, baybeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Xan Kriegor (Unreal Tournament)

UT takes a lot of what makes Unreal's arsenal great and refines it even further, in my eyes ironing out what little flaws still remained within it. Previously the Biorifle was only useful for spamming and zoning, which usually only resulted in trading deaths at best if your target had a weapon that could hit you directly - in UT though you can hold the altfire's charge for as long as you like, which makes it a good first shot in a skirmish and has the potential to be the only shot if you manage to land a direct hit. The Ripper, this game's version of the Razorjack, has a much better firerate and an altfire that actually has obvious applications, making it much better in its intended purpose of shooting motherfuckers around corners. And although you lose out on a Dispersion Pistol, the close range Impact Hammer you get in return can actually be used as a rocket jumping tool, to the point that it's safer and more useful than using actual rockets. So having pointed out all these improvements, there's something else that needs to be said - I've never actually played this game online.

That's probably left more than a few people scratching their heads. Who the hell would play an arena shooter singleplayer only? How do you even do that? Answer one is something I fear has become a lost art in recent years - bots. Unreal had them in their own multiplayer mode too, and in many circumstances were even a match for human players, and UT brought them back with some more expanded options, like being able to influence their accuracy, skill and weapon of preference. In fact, UT in general is just ridiculously customizable, thanks in large part to its Mutator system which can instantly change up the way any given match plays, such as changing gravity, forcing all combatants to use a single weapon, or making all shots instantly kill. And when one tired of even the bredth of options UT offers its players, they gave them the option to make their own.

See, I don't think I know a single other game that threw modders a bone quite like the original Unreal Tournament did. It needs to be said that as prolific as Doom's modding community is, it's also something of a happy accident - the modding community as we know it today depends of having the source code to the original game, which didn't come easily for various reasons. Not only did every copy of Unreal Tournament contain the same development tools and code their own team used, the GOTY version of the game even included a mod as an extra - ChaosUT, probably best known for its Bastard Sword, the sentient, smack-talking bouncing mines known as Proxys, and a fun-as-all-hell grappling hook amongst a host of other arsenal and gameplay tweaks. Epic even included the entirety of the original Unreal's assets besides the maps and a good deal of dummied out content, which fans since fleshed out into mods and mutators of their own. They even added singleplayer campaigns back into the game, breathing a second wind into the game all by itself.

So you're probably wondering where all these mods are these days, then. At the height of the series, UT definitely rivalled if not surpassed Doom's community - but the simple answer is that standards changed. In the days of UT99, it was enough to just slap a different texture onto an existing model and call it a different weapon entirely by letting the coding do the talking. But UT2004, in addition to raising the standards for modelling and texturing new stuff, gave birth to Ballistic Weapons which in addition to adding a massive arsenal of weapons to the game, changed the way they all handled and gave it all a degree of animation and graphical flair that nobody could compete with - so nobody did, because everyone was running BW anyways, stifiling creativity in much the same way Brutal Doom did for a few years. By the time Unreal Tournament 3 came out, the amount of effort it took to create a mod that stood out flat out rivalled making your own god damn game - to the point that many UT3 mods, most notably Red Orchestra and Killing Floor off the top of my head, just said "fuck it" and split from Unreal Tournament entirely to make it big on their own. And to be totally blunt, It was around that time that Epic stopped caring about Unreal in general - licensing the Unreal Engine out to people basically saved them the trouble of making games of their own to stay afloat, and their half-hearted attempt to make a new UT in early access quickly died out once they realized how much money Fortnite made for them.

Despite all this, though, the original UT is still rich with fanmade content - and like Doom, there are several examples of it that have their own entries later in this list. If you're looking to get into UT modding yourself, do yourself a favour and look up OldSkool Amp'd first, which you'll need to enable the various singleplayer campaigns made specifically for it.

August 22, 2020

Dr. Eggman (Sonic Robo Blast 2)

Now introducing the first Doom mod in our list, a total conversion that... well, turns the entire game into a Sonic platformer. Having loosely followed this game since around the Castle Eggman update, I was honestly surprised just how long this game has been in development for - the earliest update I could find was right before the turn of the millenium, and I have little doubt work was being done on it even before that. So many things have happened in the time between now and then - team members have come and gone, the level roster has gone through expansions and total overhauls, gained a modding community of its own, someone created a mod that became so big has its own modding community, and just recently after decades of working on it, the team finally implemented slopes into an engine best known for large flat surfaces. If there's a point I'm trying to make with all this, it's that SRB2 is absolutely a labour of love and passion made by a bunch of dudes in their spare time, and could very well be the most prolific Sonic fangame out there. That makes things just a little complicated to reminisce on, though, because of just how much the game has changed over the years - it's entirely possible the retrospective I'm typing right now doesn't reflect the game you remember it as, the game I remember it as, or even the game as it is right now.

Let's start with a few niggling flaws every version has in common. I don't know if it needs to be said, but jumping on sprites in a 3D environment can actually be very awkward - without any perception of depth, it's difficult to tell where an enemy's hitbox starts or ends, and it's not uncommon to unexpectedly fall short and take a hit like a complete idiot by touching the ground and running into them. But in the first place, a lot of enemies feel like they represent so little threat that completely ignoring them genuinely seems like a better option, often letting you just roll right through them without pause. Even with the addition of slopes, it's hard not to shake the feeling that levels are still prevailingly flat a lot of the time - in fact I find their implementaton of it quite irritating in places because you can't jump directly upwards off them. Maybe it's something one can become accustomed to with practice, but most of what I can remember of interacting with slopes is falling off bloody big sideways slanted cliffs and not actually rolling down them to gain speed, which seems like absolutely the wrongest possible application of them.

SRB2 also has a habit of going way too goddamn far with its later game bosses. I can still remember the infamous Brak Eggman in versions before this, where you had to somehow land directly on top of a gigantic sprite with altered physics and an overwhelming touch of death hitbox, and later had to jump directly into projectiles to steer them back into the boss despite nothing else in the game behaving this way. In the current version I got as far as Castle Eggman's boss before getting exhausted with all the bullshit associated with it, and honestly i haven't touched the game since? It's honestly an incredibly strange difficulty spike that at best, should have occured much, much later into the game, because it's honestly already final boss tier by itself.

Be that as it may, despite its inconsistencies and growing pains, it's still a fun game in its own right - and considering it costs nothing and you don't even need to own Doom to play it, you don't really lose anything by trying it out for yourself.

August 23, 2020

Davis and Woody (Little Fighter 2)

SRB2 may be a game made independently by fans, but I think LF2 might very well be the first real indie game on this list. It exists as sort of a psuedo hybrid between a fighter and a Streets of Rage esque beat em up, having command inputs and capacity for relatively complex combos, but also a fake Z axis that required you to actually line up with your opponent before landing blows on them and (often random) items that could litter the battlefield and be used to your advantage. I'm not actually completely sure why this game has command inputs at all to be perfectly honest, because almost all of them are a variation of block + direction + attack / jump - although it has online play, it's definitely a game designed with local in mind, which often meant several people sharing one keyboard, so I guess this could have been a hacky means of preserving keyboard space? But honestly, just making one extra button for special moves could have fixed so much jank with this game it isn't even funny.

Given its close likeness to traditional beat em ups, it of course has an arcade mode where you traverse a variety of locations and wipe out all the mooks you find along the way. Sadly, the environments won't be as complex as the kind you find in Streets of Rage 2, or even SoR1 - there's no stage specific gimmicks, hazards, or even so much as objects you can smash as an incidental part of fighting. Just backdrops for whatever enemies and items the game is programmed to spawn between waves. What LF2 DOES have all to itself, though, is the ability to save allied NPCs to recruit them to your side, effectively growing into a small army as the stages progress. This of course has the tendency to turn action into something of a clusterfuck, to the point that it can sometimes be difficult to coordinate yourself with an enemy in amongst the sea of faces (especially in co-op, as enemies are multiplied according to player count), but it's numbers you'll often need anyway because the boss of any given scenario usually has an army of their own to deal with. These kinds of skirmishes have enough of a focus in the game that there's even an alternate single match mode for shoving a selection of players in amongst two sides of a matching army and tasking them with helping it get the upper hand whenever you tire of ordinary brawls.

LF2 is also designed to be pretty modular by standards of the day. All the sprites are out in the open in unencrypted bitmap format for anyone to modify to their liking, and there's even an unused Template character for people to draw over the top of without messing with any of the original characters. And much like MUGEN, once you understand how the programming works it isn't much trouble to just modify files that determine the base roster to add your own characters to the game - through this there's a notable community of people who have tweaked characters, added extra ones and even entirely new rosters as their own separate games of sorts. Most people just got the reskins that made Woody, Davis and Dennis into Super Saiyans though, because of course they did.

Oh, did I mention it's free? I can't believe their website is still up after this long.

August 24, 2020

So this game has brought us a new milestone - we're officially in the new millennium. That's right, we've covered 10 years of gaming up to this point! Is it that time already? Well I guess I DID tell myself the N64 section of this list was kind of brief. I guess I don't have anything special to say this time, but it'd feel wrong if I didn't at least point it out, so moving on to our first game of the year 2000:

Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark)

"Perfect by name" gets thrown around a lot when discussing Perfect Dark. It isn't difficult to see why - although certain aspects of it have aged worse than others, it still stands as the best console FPS of its time, and could even be described as the best non-twinstick console shooter period depending on who you ask. As I do with most FPSs, it's pertinent to start with the arsenal, and PD has plenty to love - guns of all shapes, sizes, specialties and eccentricities, from the humble Falcon 2 to the dual purpose Superdragon. Probably its best known guns serve something of a gimmicky nature, such as the Farsight XR, an alien sniper rifle that can shoot across the map through walls and has an x-ray scope to match, and the Laptop Gun, which can be thrown wholesale against any surface to function as an automated turret. Of course, with weapons this diverse, the balance ebbs and flows a lot too - it's hard to justify a semi-auto weapon at all when most enemies die in just a handful of shots anyway, and the aformentioned Farsight is considered broken in most maps just by virtue of one shot killing enemies that aren't even in the same postcode as you without any danger to your own person. Not that it helps that there's absolutely no means of restoring your health in this game even when hit by shots that you can survive - depending on your difficulty or Combat Simulator settings, getting hit at all in a firefight can more or less sentence you to death in the next, so sometimes you have to make your modest health pool last for quite a goddamn while.

One area that Perfect Dark is almost unmatched in even today though, is feedback. I don't just mean gun sounds, even though those are fucking fabulous too - I consider the Falcon 2 and CMP low points in that regard, but every other gun looks, sounds and feels so fucking cool to fire and I never get sick of it. But no, PD excels more in how enemies react to fire, with an attention to detail not seen before and rarely seen since. Enemies flinch and writhe depending on where your shots land, and there is a ridiculous amount of unique animations for hitting them in specific areas of their body, and can even have lasting effects on them if they survive it. Hit them in the leg, and they start limping everywhere. In the arm, they clutch their wounds whenever they walk, and I wouldn't be surprised if it affected their accuracy too. You can shoot their gun right out of their motherfucking hands if you're accurate enough, and they'll even hunt it down and pick it back up if you give them the opportunity to (or pull out a backup gun if they can't find it). And yes, you can shoot them in the dick or directly up the butthole. It doesn't serve any special purpose, but the animations are definitely amusing as all hell.

Although I love this game to death, I still have to be honest and say that standards have changed. Mechanically speaking Perfect Dark is still brilliant, but it has that sub-20fps framerate that honestly seems to be a signature of late N64 titles, and there are sections of the game that suffer horribly because of it. Even putting aside the fact that it can make the game difficult to look at, the framerate also causes inputs to buffer incorrectly between lost frames, which often means you can't actually fire certain weapons (notably the aformentioned Falcon 2) as fast as they're designed to. I don't think I've ever seen another game eat inputs so bad that it can make an entire class of weapons worthless, made all the more irritating by the fact that said weapon class almost always forms your starting weapon in any given mission.

The good news is that there are alternatives - certain emulator options allow you play Perfect Dark at its maximum possible framerate. Isn't it kinda crazy that this game is capped at 60fps even though it can almost never reach under normal circumstances? There are also options to play the game with mouse and keyboard, which if you ask me fixes almost every other remaining problem wiht the game and makes it well worth playing today. If for some reason you want to give Microsoft more money instead, the HD port of the game on XBLA is similarly optimized in the framerate department and has updated graphics that... I guess you either like or hate. Personally I just think they're unnecessary.

August 25, 2020

JC Denton (Deus Ex)

So remember how I said System Shock 2 inspired other games to follow its example? Deus Ex could almost be seen as a spiritual successor of sorts. It does many of the same general things as SS2 - an overarching levelling system that rewards you for your actions and interactions, special perks that can be acquired at various points throughout the game, and open-ended design that encourages you to explore your surroundings and solve problems your own way. This is about where the similarities end - rather than trapped aboard a starship stuck in the middle of two factions fighting for dominance, you're an agent in post-dystopian Earth, hunting down terrorists that have stolen a shipment of vaccines for a deadly virus sweeping the world. And whereas gun handling in SS2 might influence your damage, guns are always deadly in Deus Ex - increasing your skills with them simply influences how good your aim is.

You're probably thinking "why bother levelling up guns at all if they don't make you do more damage"? I'll tell you why - because your aim is absolutely atrocious without it. This doesn't come from the Unreal "bounce off a wall and lob a fully charged glob of GES Biorifle at someone's face in midair" school of shooter design by a long shot - without the right training, bullets can fly upwards of thirty degrees off target, and unless you stand perfectly still for a good 10-20 seconds you're just incapable of hitting a small target like someone's head reliably at all. It's a game that definitely encourages you to act cautious and be the first word in any firefight, because aiming requires you to be a sitting duck for an uncomfortable amount of time, which you definitely don't want with multiple motherfuckers with machineguns bearing down on you. Be that as it may, even I think the original Deus Ex's handling of this was extreme in ways it didn't need to be - if it were a brand new cop fresh out of basic training I'd understand, but JC is an incredibly expensive revolution in nanotechnology even in his absolute most basic form, and the one place I can't suspend my disbelief in this game is the idea that anyone, let alone UNATCO, would lead an investment like that into a small enemy army and a hostage situation with weapons comprehension closer to Guns Akimbo than The Matrix, right on the doorstep of their own fucking HQ.

The rest of the writing though is absolutely groundbreaking for its time, though, and there's worldbuilding everywhere that slowly paints such a realistic picture of how its dystopian future came to be that the whole narrative could be likened to a playable redpill. In fact, not only are many of the circumstances that lead up to Deus Ex happening right the fuck now, in some facets the real thing is actually worse than Deus Ex imagined. Healthcare systems that leave people for dead if they don't have extortionate amounts of money to pay them (hmm), World policy being influenced by the mega-rich in order to further increase the wealth gap and control the weakening general populace (Hmm). A plot to control and censor the entire internet to gaslight people into believing this is all completely normal (although China probably still uses human moderators for this in the current day). And to top it all off:

Spoiler

A global pandemic in which both the cure and the virus are made by the same company, using their monopoly to jack their prices up to absurd levels. Though the lattermost part is common enough practice in the medical industry that they have terms specifically for it, it's anyone's guess right now whether this will turn out to be true for COVID-19 - but if it does, you heard it from Deus Ex first, twenty years ago!

If this sort of thing makes you uncomfortable, good. It absolutely fucking should. Most of media in general, let alone videogames, don't treat modern oppression with this kind of accuracy and still weave it into a fictional narrative in the process - and it's there, above all else, that Deus Ex shines.

So what about the rest of the DX games? Let's get the least controversial statement out of the way first - Invisible War is crap. Apparently it still has the same political and dystopian intrigue in its writing that its predecessor did, but it's streamlined to such degrees that it's actively harmful to itself, like all weapons using a single ammo type and their gigantic, wide open environments being squashed down into tiny rooms and corridors in order to show off their cutting edge lighting without killing their framerate in the process. If any game in the series can compare to the original, it's probably Human Revolution. It's dunked way too hard into yellow/sepia filters and treats every melee attack - even ones from the front against alert enemies long past any option of stealth - as a scripted animated takedown that completely interrupts the action and freezes everyone else around you, but everything else is still solid for what it is. I haven't touched Mankind Divided at all, mainly because the rampant fucking hypocrisy of a dystopian narrative caused by out of control corporate greed while parading around preorder incentives like this was absolutely not lost on me.

August 26, 2020

Wise Old Man (Runescape)

I first saw this game over at a childhood friend's place and seeing their brother playing this in the background. Even for its time it looked incredibly basic, but there was just something enthralling about the idea that nearly every character on the screen at any time was an actual human being doing their own thing, so I decided to give it a shot. And by fuck did I give it a shot - I eventually levelled up high enough to mine and smelt Runite, learnt spells that required resources that weren't even craftable for free members even after they added the ability to craft them, and completed every quest for the free realm and left only the capacity to grow stronger after the fact. Some time after the Dungeoneering update - a skill tied into exploration of a roguelike, randomly generating dungeon - I remember standing at the entrance for a good five minutes or so wondering to myself "what the fuck am I doing"? It was then that I suddenly came apon an epiphany - I wasn't having fun. In fact, I never was.

This seems to be a trapping of basically any MMO or live service of note - it's not the player's enjoyment that the developers and publishers value, but their engagement, their ability to keep their players stuck doing dumb, menial tasks on a loop to reap the benefits of subscription costs, ad revenue and the ability to boast to their shareholders to keep THEIR engagement too. In Runescape's case, it was the fact that gear is expensive and combat drops are crap, so you almost always had to pick up a secondary craft to make goods to sell for money, and these crafts were almost always some variation of "gather resource > move to other location > process resource into product > move to other location > sell / store finished product > move to location > repeat from step one". The only reason players couldn't just drop this grind right there and then is because Runescape is a game of constantly moving towards goals, and then shifting those goalposts once you reach that target - much like the psychology behind Cookie Clicker, except at least Cookie Clicker does not want your fucking actual money for it.

The rest is a little hard to comment on just on account of how much the game has changed, and not always for the better. Back when I still had any investment in the game, the whole thing was just a numbers game - in a fight, it was mostly just watching two health bars trickling downwards and then quaffing down some food if it got too low, and the winner of any given fight was usually determined simply by who had more food on hand. The system has changed drastically since then, this much I know, but I don't actually know what it IS anymore because I have no inclination to get back into it because every problem I have with Runescape and practically its whole genre is an intrinsic part of how it functions. No matter what it does and what it changes, Runescape will always be less of a game and more of a business model, wherein the players are the product rather than the customer, and preying apon gullible idiots who honestly believe they can get something for nothing is the norm in all of its forms.

And to top it all off? People barely fucking interact with each other anyway unless it's to sell other people shit, so there isn't even any reason to play it as a social experience. And that's even assuming any of them are still legitimately human anymore - the game had a serious botting problem in the state I last left it, and by all accounts it sounds like it's gotten even worse since. Listen, there are much better games to play if you're in it to interact with other people, and they're not necessarily even MMOs. Don't fall into the same trap I did and believe more people online equals more people to talk to.

August 27, 2020

Conker (Conker's Bad Fur Day)

Until Bad Fur Day, Conker didn't really have much of a presence in the gaming world. He was there, sure, but an entirely different beast to what he is today, closer to something one might expect of Rare's output - but there was just something about him that couldn't compete with Rare's other mascots, let alone on the oversaturated global stage of mascot platformers of his era. So clearly what he needed was an overhaul, something that would absolutely make him stand out from everything around him, so Rare did what everyone does when they're out of ideas - they got edgy. The cutesy look was just a facade - now, it was a game with copious swearing, blood and sexual themes, and BFD goes a step further and even formulates its crudeness into actual gameplay elements - such as the ability to get shitfaced drunk in certain sections and piss on things, and an entire section of the game made almost exclusively out of shit, with a jazzy backing track punctuated by fart noises. It's one of the most juvenile experiences a game can possibly be, and the strangest thing is, it actually... worked? Not only did Conker get exactly the kind of noteriety it was looking for, it was actually legitimately a good game in its own right, which is such a rare event for this kind of approach I honestly can't think of another example of an IP that took it this far and ended up better off than they were beforehand.

Though BFD openly appears to have the same trappings of a wide open environment, in truth it's actually much more closed off than its Rareware brothers and sisters. One could argue the cold, hard cash you collect throughout the game serves the same purpose as Jiggies and Golden Bananas, but there isn't actually all that much of it, and there are only like 2-3 bundles of it that you can collect out of sequence - so basically, it's an open environment that only incentivizes you to take a select few routes through it. It's not a huge disappointment, but it feels like they could have done much more with their level design than they ultimately did. There are sections of the game later on, especially the mansion and the warfront, that are absolute bastard to play on your first playthrough and some segments that are incredibly difficult even then, with the penultimate escape sequence from the latter forming a sharp difficulty spike that the game never really matches again, even in the lead up to the final boss. That all being said, though, if you're patient with its inconsistent difficulty BFD's singleplayer mode is still a very solid platformer overall, thanks in no small part to its peurile writing helping to distract from its faults.

Yes, singleplayer mode - implying a multiplayer one. There's a pretty wide variety of modes, but almost all of them are wacky, chaotic fun, and its weapon balancing is unlike almost anything else I've ever seen - almost every weapon is broken in in such a weird way that their brokenness clashes with each other and cancels each other out. The SMGs can stunlock people to death pretty quickly, the revolver is a guaranteed one shot kill, the sword can decapitate people and hide you from the radar, and the bazooka is... well, a fucking bazooka. Even the throwing knives, which most people overlook in comparison, autoaim directly for people's faces whenever you're not manually aiming, which can cause instakill headshots with barely even coming to a stop for it. It's clearly not designed to be played competitively and is all the more fun for it, which is more than I can say for most multiplayer games these days - it's one thing to be fair and balanced, but too many do so at the cost of stripping options of what made them fun to play in the first place.

Which brings us to Conker as it stands today.

It's no secret that Rare was bought out by Microsoft before a sequel could be made, but when one of the first images you see of the game is a Tediz with pigtails dual wielding katanas, you generally take that a sign that not only is the wackyness of that multiplayer mode still intact, they're doubling down on it. Sometime between then and the release of Live and Reloaded though, someone high up said "hey you know what, this cartoon squirrel game about mixing and matching wildly different weapons needs a fucking class based shooter multiplayer instead". And to top it all off, it wasn't even a genuine sequel at the end of the day, just a literal retread of the original game with redone graphics. What the hell happened? How did they look back on everything that made Conker great and decided this was what he needed? In the years that followed Conker would probably be treated the worst out of any fallen mascot I can think of, never getting a game to himself ever again and only occasionally being trotted out as a bonus for brownie points whenever Rare or Microsoft have hit a ditch they need to dig themselves out of - and the less said about the atrocity that is Young Conker, the better.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. Chris Seavor, the much known and loved VA for Conker, clearly got sick of the way the IP was being treated and started his own brand Gory Detail, with the eventual goal of making a spirtitual Conker successor of his own. That was about two years ago now, so here's hoping, eh?

August 28, 2020

Big the Cat and Chao (Sonic Adventure DX / 2)

Well, we were bound to get to this point eventually. The SAs are thought by many as one of the high points of the series alongside the original trilogy, and I can't deny the fun I had with them when they were relevant - but when you look back on them in hindsight, cracks start to form. HUGE ones. We're talking like fucking fissures here. So yeah, fair warning - I'm about to say some pretty controversial shit, but even knowing that there are people here that would flay me alive for it I still have to be objective and admit they have a lot of flaws. Some for its day, and some by modern standards.

When talking about the Adventures, you have to remember that this was the first mainline Sonic game in over an entire console generation. Yes, Sonic Xtreme was so awful and mismanaged that it caused Sonic to miss the entirety of the Sega Saturn, forcing them to fill it with ports and spinoffs. The reason I bring it up here is because Sonic also missed the entire 3D revolution because of it, and as a result, didn't benefit from a lot of standards that had been established since - most notably in the case of its camera, which is a massive pain to control manually at any point and doesn't always cooperate even when left to do its own thing. There's other smaller things, like the awful lip syncing (legendarily awful, in SA1's case), but the camera is probably the most obvious and impactful example of it.

Probably the biggest problems with the Adventures, though, emerge from the simple fucking inability to take a single approach to gameplay and stick with it, instead splitting it off into numerous unnecessary forks between the gameplay of individual characters. Roughly a third of both games play out in a way that could actually be described as a Sonic game, the remainder instead spreading out into experimental - and frankly unsatisfying - mutually exclusive diversions without any mechanical common ground. Some characters don't even share the same physics, let alone the same core components, and when one of them (Big) is so awful and out of place that it makes Sonic fans of all walks of life and preference - the OG poster children for bitching and bickering over the most menial, meaningless shit imaginable - unanimously agree on exactly how awful and out of place it is, it should tell you a lot about how fucking badly they read the room when it came to designing these characters. And the effect of this school of design is still felt today, long after alternate playable characters were removed from the equation completely. It's never been enough for Sega and Sonic Team to just make a game that's fun of its own merits, they always have to muddy the waters by introducting some dumbass gimmick even on the offchance that the game itself turns out fine overall, and it's right here that the practice first started.

What this creates in practice is a game that's at its most entertaining only after you've cleared it so you can skip the extraneous bullshit that drags it down, and I honestly don't know any other games on this list that I can say that about. They feel like games that have come across replay value entirely by accident, in some of the worst possible ways. And that brings me to Chao. Look, I have to be blunt about this - all power to you if you happen to like virtual pets, especially if that still somehow persists to current day, but this shit blends with Sonic like BBQ sauce and strawberry jam. Some of you are probably weirded out hearing that after the replay value it's given them, how it encourages them to play levels again when they wouldn't normally. Do you know what it actually incentives? Playing one level over and over again for your choice of Chaos Drives, rubbing them one by one against a Chao's face in hopes that you actually have enough to make them stronger, and repeat until you hopefully have the numbers to overcome challenges you otherwise have no actual fucking control over.

This isn't replay value - it's grinding. It's not like it even encourages you to do levels any better than you could without a Chao to look after, because collecting the drives themselves usually requires you to waste time coming to a stop or coordinating yourself to them that could otherwise be crucial ranking time, and some might even argue that engaging enemies at all in certain circumstances already costs you time anyway. It's the absolute most bare bones interaction between main game and side game imaginable, made all the more irritating by the fact that actual bonuses for platforming content - namely the then-legendary Green Hill level in SA2 - are gated off behind Emblems you can only get there.

Does any of this mean that SA1 and 2 can't be enjoyed today? Of course not - I'm not cynical enough to claim the success of these two games is purely a fluke. Even still, the enjoyment of these two games is made in spite of their mechanics, not because of them - and had Sega or Sonic Team paid any attention to all the early warning signs that were already there this early on instead of blindly accepting these games as the golden standard for everything that came after, there's a very good chance the franchise might not be in the state it is today. There was never just any one game that doomed this franchise to mediocrity - much like their hardware efforts, Sega kept letting smaller issues pile up over the course of about a decade, and once they could no longer get back on top of things it would only take one substantial failure to ruin almost all trust in the brand they were milking.

August 29, 2020

Ryo Hazuki (Shenmue II)

Why in the goddamn fuck do people like this game?

Alright, that's coming on a bit strong. Let's take a step back. There are aspects of Shenmue's design that are still felt in games today, and that much at least I have to give it credit for. It's an urban open world game in which every individual NPC has their own schedules and behaviours, almost all of which can be spoken to with fully voiced dialogue. It's a world in which the overarching goal of the narrative need not be the sole focus of your adventure, with side activities strewn all over the place and sometimes end up being extremely helpful to you regardless. It's an experience in which you need to make sure your player character has a place to sleep every night, and be able to cover rent costs wherever you're staying. The thing is, it's not designed in such a way that any of it is in any sense fun. I've played beat em up and open world adventures of all walks of life, and somehow against all odds, Shenmue II manages to be the single worst of both worlds out of any game in either genre I can recall.

Okay, still coming on too strong. Let me elaborate.

Let's start with that rent thing, actually. I don't have a problem with having to raise enough money to spend the night somewhere - there are plenty of games out there that do it just fine. But somehow, Shenmue is convinced the best way to handle that is an actual job in manual labour polluted with quick time events. There are other options, sure - but almost all of them either net you even less money, or come at great personal risk to your own funds, to the point that the game genuinely expects you to believe that gambling for it is a legitimate option. Either way, it feels ridiculous that a quest motivated by a martial-arts-flick-esque thirst for vengeance is reduced to padding the game out in such a fucking ridiculous, pathetic way. If there had been actual side quests or even just money to be found along the path of the main story and lifting crates was a secondary option I would not have thought twice about it.

Even when you get to some semblance of actual action, Shenmue II is a constant anticlimax. I can only assume Yu Suzuki couldn't be fucked to make game mechanics as open ended as the world design, because entire encounters have a tendency to play out in QTE only, from fights to chases to even simple shit like breaching doors and making jumps. And it would be irritating enough if these sequences were consistently punishing - failing them can mean restarting anywhere from 2 to 20 minutes ago from scratch, and sometimes you're not given the option to repeat at all, but on one other occasion I left Ryo to follow an NPC to my destination while I went to the toilet and came back to find they'd been repeating and failing the same QTE for about 2-3 minutes straight without any consequences at all. I wish I could tell you what the actual fighting is like, but Shenmue never gives you any real chance of experiencing it - the only actual fights I got to experience from start to finish were random encounters with mook thugs. Every other fight I got into was cut short for stupid reasons, and all the sparring you do besides that is with characters that dodge your every move, so it's impossible to get a feel for how weighty or effective any given combination of moves is. Maybe it's actually deceptively complex? But I'll never know that, because the game as far as I can tell never gives you a chance to use it to anything resembling its full potential, and what little I experienced painted it as incredibly shallow button mashing instead.

The final straw for me was coming apon the need to fight various big name prize fighters to impress... somebody. Honestly, can't remember, not important. What's important is that the biggest ones have an entry fee - and that entry fee is quadruple fucking digits. For perspective, the shift work you get from hauling crates might get you 50-100 if you're lucky. Never in all of my years have I ever seen such a shameless, disgusting padding barrier in a videogame out of nowhere as I have in Shenmue II, and it was enough for me to drop the controller right the fuck there and never touch the game again. The amount of disrespect Yu Suzuki has for the player's time and patience is fucking appalling, and once again, I cannot comprehend how anyone can still respect the man knowing this is exactly the kind of shit he pulls in Shenmue. Do yourselves a favour and just get Yakuza instead.

August 30, 2020

Ditto (Pokemon Stadium 2)

Pokemon has an... interesting relationship with console games, almost exactly the opposite as they would be with any other IP. Whereas handheld titles were once known as bargain bin distractions designed to hook people into their console variations, console Pokemon games have a habit of being supplementary experiences to the handheld ones, to the point that a main Pokemon title recently releasing on the Switch at all was seen as precedent forming. We'll get into the how and why of that later - the point I'm making is that console Pokemon games were by design completely different experiences to what you tend to expect from their main output - sometimes to a frustrating degree - and Stadium 2 was by no means an exception.

The first thing that stands out about Stadium 2 for me is the Pokemon Academy. Understand that until this point, fighting in actual Pokemon battles was typically ever seen as a strategy with two elements - being higher level than the enemy, and having an advantage against the enemy in the game's signature scissors-paper-rock roulette that is the typing system. The former, however, doesn't actually occur in this game, because every scenario either has strict level limits, or your opponent's levels will match your highest level Pokemon. More on that later, too. The Academy was incredible at the time because it taught you in no uncertain terms that there was actually quite a bit of strategy at the highest level of play if you had the patience to suss out a team and their moveset synergy and raise them up from scratch. From simple stuff like Thunder and Earthquake being able to stuff Fly and Dig spammers respectively (of which there were a LOT of back then) and weather effects having an effect on certain moves beyond just being a power buff, to stuff that I never would have considered such as Endure + Reversal, the separation of Defence and Special Defence and the ability to hit Pokemon with high evasion boosts. Even the MAIN Pokemon games never covered its own strategy in this kind of depth. Why the fuck did they not? It feels like something that should have gone without saying, and yet main Pokemon games seem to exhibit a greater degree of confidence in being a numbers game and not much more.

Well, one point is that Stadium 2 needs players to grasp its strategy, because people can't brute force this game with levels. To wit, there is absolutely no focus on raising your own Pokemon from scratch - instead neary every single Pokemon of the first two generations is available to you right from the start and you simply mix and match them for the task at hand, where importing your own team is merely an optional bonus made possible by the Transfer Pak, a controller plugin that accepts Gameboy carts. This SHOULD have been the game's greatest strength - to completely remove the tedious process of levelling up your team as a barrier to competitive play, just pick some Pokemon and make them beat each other up. There's just one problem - the rental Pokemon are intentionally underpowered, with completely base stats and movesets you can't actually change to your liking, made worse still by the fact that evolved Pokemon often have significantly worse movepools than their weaker, unevolved forms. It's actually comical in a way how much of an advantage NPC trainers have over you just on account of being able to design and execute synergizing movesets completely to their liking where you can't, to the point that importing your team from a cartridge is legitimately your only option for completing some fights.

What Pokemon Stadium 2 SHOULD have been is Pokemon Showdown before Pokemon Showdown Pokemon Showdowned. Just a game where team building and strategizing forms the core of the experience and all the obstacles in the way of doing so are removed, essentially forming a competitive Pokemon sandbox. What we got instead was a scheme purpose built to force people to buy Transfer Paks, knowing full well that the game would be a chore to play without it, and knowing full well that the ability to pick your own distribution of stats and moves would have solved this problem without the need for an external Pokemon game to make it playable. Dick move, Gamefreak. Dick move.

August 31, 2020

Phoenix Wright (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney)

This is a pretty big departure from my usual fare, as I'm sure it was for most people when it first released in the west - a game that takes place almost exclusively through dialogue, and was most people's introduction to the "visual novel" style of designing games. The gameplay loop sounds simple from the outside - you're a defence lawyer, and you gather evidence from the scene of a crime, and cross reference it with testimony introduced in court to discover inconsistencies or contradictions in one or the other to direct guilt away from your client. However, it needs to be said that Phoenix Wright as a series can get pretty... wacky, for a series about legally putting murderers in their place. There's a section where you have to cross reference a fucking talking parrot on the stand, for crying out loud. And for much the same reasons as in Teenagent, this can work to both the game's advantage, and the game's biggest weaknesses.

That being, that much of the puzzle solving in this game expects you to be in the same mindset the developers were while they were making it - so sometimes a serious problem might have a silly, wacky answer, and the onus is on the player to figure out which is which. However, the game also strongly discourages experimental guesswork by penalizing the player whenever they present the wrong piece of evidence at most given points. Depending on which game in the trilogy you're playing, this can even cause you to immediately lose the case at key moments during the trial, forcing you to redo the whole day's proceedings from scratch whenever the judge gets fed up with your guesswork. I played these games on a phone many years after the fact, wherein they had savestates you could manually set, and even THAT left me bloody annoyed and clawing for a guide sometimes, nevermind people who originally owned it on a DS and did not have that luxury either way.

Even more annoying is that evidence often has an order of operations that isn't made entirely clear to the player, even when it definitively proves your client's innocence on its own and sometimes even when it's still directly relevant to the testimony you're objecting to. PW is programmed in such a way that either only one statement in a witness's testimony can be objected to with evidence, or only one item of evidence can be successfully used on a given statement to successfully object when there are realistically multiple options available (and often get brought up in the resulting objection without your input anyway!). For all its soap-opera-esque flair, sometimes it feels like you really ought to be able to just bring evidence right up to the judge directly and say "HOLY SHIT THE GUN HAS THE PROSECUTION WITNESS'S FINGERPRINTS ON IT AND NOT MY CLIENT'S, WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE YOU IGNORING THIS" instead of waiting patiently for the witness to definitively deny culpability and treating only that as an opportunity to bring the evidence in. Speaking hypothetically, of course - it's difficult to talk about specific examples without straight up spoiling them, and honestly I feel like even bringing up the parrot earlier was a bit too much.

When it works, though, it makes you feel like a super smart motherfucker for tearing apart the opposition's argument with what seems like a petty inconsistency at first. I won't say those moments are few and fleeting - Capcom definitely handles it a hell of a lot better than Teenagent did, and there are many cases throughout the history that are all the more memorable for it. But the system that handles evidence in these games is flawed, and those flaws have gone unfixed for far longer than they have any right to - in fact I'm convinced they're probably still there today, not that I've played past AA3. Sadly, this is the kind of game you can only really experience in its intended form once - as much grief as I've given Ace Attorney for how obnoxious some of its solutions are, it's definitely not the same once you already know how every scenario plays out. Kinda makes me wish there was a court game out there where all the crimes and evidence are randomly generated so every case is a surprise, but I guess that's a big ask for something that might never have the same public appeal Phoenix Wright did.

September 1, 2020

Master Chief (Halo series)

Moving on from ambiguous ports and onto the Xbox proper now. There was never any doubt that the Xbox would be the strongest platform on the market from a performance standpoint when it launched, but Microsoft really had their work cut out for them when it came to software lineups. The PS2 was at the time getting the lion's share of software support, Nintendo even at the time was world famous for its first party output, and even Sega, still reeling from the legendary bitchslap that Sony gave them with the PS2, still had debatably one of the best launch lineups out of any console ever released with the Dreamcast. Microsoft would need something HUGE to be able to compete on any level - and that's where Halo comes in.

Halo is most widely remembered as the birth of the regenerating health crazy of FPSs. It sounds incredibly stupid nowadays, but a shooter that actually incentivized taking cover to be able to replenish your ability to take damage was seen as edging towards a more realistic angle for shooters, even though most human beings can't recover from bullet wounds just by not being shot for a few seconds? At least in Halo 1 it made sense because the regenerating portion was an energy shield and you still needed to top off your physical health every now and then. Regardless of the reasoning, one thing can't be denied - it provided a new approach to shooters that wasn't just sprinting around at mach 1 and shooting people in the face, and believe or not a break from that was actually seen as a refreshing change of pace back in the day.

However, most of the things that ACTUALLY make Halo excel are more subtle details that get taken for granted in more modern days. To demonstrate, take a look at this GIF:

Don't see it yet? Okay, here's another one:

Still don't get it? Okay, here's the rub: I just showed you three drastically different methods of attacking (shooting, bashing and grenading), and none of them required you to switch weapons. Sure, there are games that have done one or the other before - there are select guns in Perfect Dark that have a melee altfire, and select guns that have explosive secondaries - but Halo is one of the first notable games I can think of that standardizes these interactions no matter what weapon you're using, so you don't need to fumble through four other weapons if you need a specific weapon for a given situation - just about any other game of its day would have treated the ability to punch and the ability to throw grenades as individual weapon slots, and tend to come off as clumsy and awkward as a result. Having more options than just the fire button is almost always a good thing as far as shooters are concerned, and I can't think of a game that demonstrates this better than the Halo series.

Halo is also one of the first console shooters I can think of that recognizes that having your aim stick to targets isn't particularly deep, while also recognizing that even twin sticks leave a lot to be desired as far as precise aiming is concerned. To this end, Bungie figured out a genius middle ground that sits so quietely in the background that most people don't even know it's there - simply put, your cursor slows down when intersecting a certain radius around an enemy, and mirrors their movements ever so slightly while you're chasing them with your crosshairs, a traits sometimes generously coined "aim assist" or "bullet magnetism". You're still required to manually track enemies with your right stick at any given time, but it ensures that you're able to focus on them with smaller, more precise movements instead of the big, jerky lurches you normally get aiming stick without it. Twin sticks will never be able to compete with mouse and keyboard in this regard, but this is such a huge step up from what consoles had prior that it's become standard in almost every first and third person shooter worth their salt since.

Most of what people appreciate Halo for after that fact largely comes down to personal preference. Maybe people like the change in scale that lets infantry and vehicles fight side by side. Maybe they have an appreciation for its universe and narrative, or maybe they appreciate it as the first true trendsetter of the online console multiplayer world. What I think we can all agree on, though, is that the magic just isn't there anymore in modern day, turned little by little into yet another one of those shooters that fleece people for cash on top of the starting price tag. Xboxes are known more for being 3rd party boxes than anything else right now, and it honestly feels like Microsoft just doesn't know what they once had anymore.

September 2, 2020

Taffer (Thievery)

And here's our first Unreal Tournament mod of the list, a total conversion themed around the Thief universe. If you're played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory before, the jist of it is probably already familiar to you - you have a team of thieves tasked with looting the map and completing map-specific objectives, and a team of guards tasked with killing them all. Now I know I said I never played UT online, and the same is true of this too - but thankfully, the guard team works alongside AI guards by design whenever one of their slots is unfilled, and these guards are still attentive enough that they can be a challenge all their own, so Thievery is still perfectly servicable as a singleplayer mod from the thief side if you treat all the maps as individual mini-scenarios instead of an overarching narrative. And honestly, even with the intention of playing it online (yes, some people occasionally still do when invited), it might help to try running maps solo first anyway, because like many competitive stealth games, the barrier of entry can be pretty high for most people.

Simply put, the guards are much more heavily armed than the thieves. Thieves don't even get a sword by default - they can put starting money into it, but it costs quite a bit that could otherwise be put into flashbombs, rope/water arrows and special potions to avoid detection. And maps are often built around the idea that guards can have either quick or brightly lit access to many crucial areas at a time, so knowing the map layout - and subsequently, all the ways you can avoid the beaten path - is a critical part of figuring out how to beat maps, let alone excel at them. Needless to say, this involves dying. A lot. And dying as a thief tends to be very punishing. You do drop all your unused tools and they can be picked back up if you make it back there, but you also tend to drop your loot in the process too. Maps tend to only have somewhat more loot than is necessary to complete it, so fishing it out of a heavily trafficked area is a challenge even with AI guards. Human players, of course, know full well thieves REALLY need that money, and will camp and boobytrap it relentlessly given the choice. I guess where I'm going with this is that you really need to put work into this mod to start getting the most enjoyment out of it, and I realize not everyone will want to.

It's a fantastic experience once you get there, though, when the rhythm of blackjacking guards, hiding bodies and panic flashbombing for safe escapes starts to set in. If you want my personal advice on where to start, TH-Korman and TH-Stronghold are probably among the most newbie and thief friendly maps to practice on, with plenty of alternate routes to discover and tricks to pull to get in and around where you need to go, and the objectives in both baps mostly speak for themselves. Thievery had a decent mapping community once apon a time, and there's enough there that you can still a nice boost to the mod's longetivity whenever you tire of all the stock maps (though granted, some map makers don't bother to add pathfinding markers for the AI). I believe there's even a port of Bafford's manor from the original games somewhere out there, which is kind of surreal to think about. If for some reason you happen to have a copy of the original Unreal Tournament and want to try this out for yourself, the original site is still open and has even been updated since the last time I played it, which I guess makes my sprite choice a little outdated. Oh well! It's how I remember it, so it's how I choose to represent it.

September 3, 2020

Alexander Roivas (Eternal Darkness)

Long thought of as the magnum opus of Silicon Knights, Eternal Darkness is something of a lovecraftian themed hack and slash with elements of classic Resident Evil thrown in (no tank controls though, and thank fuck for that). The narrative spans literal millennia by way of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a grotesque magickal book passed down through generations and contains the experiences and magickal knowledge of everyone who has ever possessed it. Each takes place in their own short story that ultimately converge in a sinister plot to summon an entire elder god to the mortal realm to enslave all humankind, with Alex here happening to be the last person in the right time to put a stop to it whilst attempting to investigate the brutal murder of her own father. While it might not seem like much by today's standards, this game was quick to boast about its storytelling vehicles. Being described as "movie like" was one hell of a compliment while it was still relevant, as there were honestly fairly few games out there that could dish it out without extensive use of FMVs until this particular console generation started winding up.

Actually playing it is... kind of basic, in hindsight. You can use a shoulder button to target enemies and aim for specific appendages, even if you're using melee weapons - but there tends not to be any actual strategy for it besides targetting the head, and baiting out their first attack if you know it won't cause them to flinch. Even on enemies that can survive this, it makes the entire remnants of any given scuffle a joke, and it feels like at the very least certain enemies should have incentivized cutting off other limbs first or even punished going straight for the head, because it really is just "attack head: the game" as it is here. There IS a magick system in play in which you can construct spells out of an assortment of runes you pick up over the eras, but actually casting a spell takes forever because every individual rune needs to be pronounced out loud, during which a zombie can simply just slap you out of it and interrupt the casting. And despite having to put individual runes together into spells, the actual spell list is disappointingly limited, with so many rune combinations not touched apon at all, and you'll tend not to get much use out of them besides the enchant spell that lets you do even more head damage and the healing spell, with others only occasionally being used as mandatory advances of the plot before going right back to being ignored again.

Eternal Darkness however, is probably best known for its sanity system. At any given time your character has a sanity meter, and every time you witness a monster, it goes down. When it gets low, your character starts to occasionally hallucinate before abruptly being dragged back to reality. And these hallucinations are at their most brilliant when they break the fourth wall in the process, causing the volume to turn down or mute, change channels or abruptly turn your TV off, simulate a controller malfunction and most terrifyingly and cruelly of all, pretending to delete your motherfucking save data instead of saving it. Other times though, it feels like these hallucinations openly take the piss and were implemented more for a laugh than to scare you, like causing you to grow or shrink unexpectedly or making your torso explode while trying to heal, and honestly it really takes me out of the experience when the game goes to that kind of trouble to mock itself instead of casting genuine doubt over whether what you are experience is genuinely real. This is before you get into the fact that you can restore your own sanity meter, and depending on a seemingly innocuous choice you make early on it might be the second spell you learn in the game, so you often have to intentionally neglect your sanity in order to play this game the way it was clearly designed to. It nevertheless was the best attempt at a sytem like this so far, but it makes me sad that there is so much room for improvement and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever really built on it.

It's hard to say where things could go from here. Supposedly Nintendo owns the IP now, and to no surprise has apparently done nothing but sit on it these past 18 years. As far as I'm concerned, the critical success of Eternal Darkness was a fluke, as Silicon Knights would go on to produce bomb after bomb since - where that story ends though, is a tale for another entry in this list...

September 4, 2020

Nightmare (Soul Calibur 2)

SC2 is probably the first true 3D fighter on this list, in that the Z axis forms an integral part of its gameplay instead of throwing 3D models onto a 2D axis. It's an approach to fighting I have... mixed experiences with. It feels like so many options are stuffed too easily simply by just sidestepping as an enemy approaches, and most attacks designed specifically to counter that with wide sweeping swings have long windups that the opponent can still easily react to. It also brings with it an emphasis on Ring Outs, where knocking an opponent clear out of the arena instantly kills them, and this has inconsistent applications too. Sometimes the arena is completely surrounded by a pit, sometimes it's just one side with walls in every other direction, and sometimes it could even be just a fucking water fountain in the corner of the stage, so the effectiveness of some characters can very well depend on the locale more than how their kit functions normally. I dunno, honestly I feel like Soul Calibur would be better off if it was all or nothing, you know? Either completely enclosed or completely surrounded by pits.

This being a fighting game, of course I gotta bring up the whole spiel about cheatcode inputs again. Contrary to what was otherwise the norm in fighting games, command inputs are actually fairly uncommon in these 3D fighters, and wherever they did exist they tended to lean more towards single moves than combo starters and continuers like they functioned as in more traditional games. And with some occasional exceptions (seriously, how the living fuck does anyone pull off Ivy's command grabs?), they're quite simple straight motions or quarter circle movements, so for once this is a fighting game besides Smash I can say that execution isn't a ludicrous barrier of entry. If any such barrier exists in Soul Calibur, it's memory. What SC2 employs instead is a system I like to internally dub "simon says" combos, where one of a series of premade strings are executed through a collection of alternating button presses instead of just stringing individual moves together where it suits the context, and honestly I feel like this approach to fighting is... equally as bad? It removes the execution barrier but makes most of the combo game happen in a controlled space you don't have much influence over, and it doesn't feel to me like these things should be mutually exclusive at all. This is before you get into the unlockable characters, which don't have a fucking readable movelist AT ALL, so actually figuring out how to play them is an absolute crapshoot.

That being said, one thing I DO have to give SC2 credit for is the fact that it actually has a pretty extensive singleplayer campaign on top of the usual arcade ladder, with an emphasis on buying additional weapons, completing dungeons full of treasure and enemy encounters and fights with unique criteria that might not necessarily be just "hit the enemy until their health reaches 0". And honestly, it drives me up the fucking wall that more fighting games don't do this, because technically speaking fighting games are already designed like a smaller part of a much larger game with all the fat removed. How the hell is it that there aren't more fighting games where the fighting part is used where the random encounters and boss fights would otherwise sit in an RPG? I genuinely don't understand what keeps these people from using their fighting game mechanics to drive a much larger game, because it's not like they can't keep their hyper balanced focused competitive modes intact like they did for this game.

Alright, so let's talk versions. Soul Calibur has a history of spicing things up for respective platform owners by giving each version of the game a single unique character, and in SC2 it was Link, Spawn and Heihachi. Listen, I like crossovers in fighters, but I have to be blunt about this - this is a fucking stupid approach. How exactly do you run tournies of these games if every version is legitimately different from the other? What happens if you main Heihachi and the tourney runs the Xbox version that doesn't have it? It honestly just invites an absolute clusterfuck onto its players, and it doesn't seem fair to put that responsibility onto them when the developers could simply just give every platform the same cast. It also needs to be said that I ran the Gamecube version in particular, which is honestly an indictment of just how fucking awful the Cube pad's button layout was for anything besides platformers and Smash Bros, legendary ergonomics be damned. Do you have any idea how hard it is to press B and X together without mashing the gigantic fucking A button between them? How hard was it just to make four equal sized buttons in the space given? Why do they STILL do this even after re-releasing it for Smash? Namco had their work cut out for them either way no matter what their approach to porting would have been, and there's really nobody else at fault but Nintendo for this one.

September 5, 2020

Boogie Man (Soldat)

This is another one of those Indie games that got popular in schoolgrounds around here in large part due to the fact it was a) free, and b) could run on just about any old potato you installed it on. Obstensibly, it's an arena shooter that takes place entirely in 2D - rather than the mouse physically shifting your viewpoint around, your view more or less always remains the same and your aim just follows an onscreen cursor instead. One would think that invites problems compared to its first person counterparts, but Soldat has put in a surprising amount of work to make the game function well within its own limitations. For starters, yes, you can see other players through walls by default, but there's also a setting that obscures players whenever you aren't looking directly at them, so stealth and ambush tactics can actually still work without physically obscuring your character behind a crate or something. 2D platforming doesn't work all that well when you have realistic jumping height, especially when people are shooting at you, so Soldat just gives everyone fucking rocket boots instead so they can fly wherever they need to be within reason. And just being able to point and click at enemies is a fair bit harder than it might sound from the outside because characters are so small they don't have rendered facial features, so yes, you still need to actually aim in this game, and yes headshots are still quite a feat when all is said and done. Even the Barret sniper rifle has the ability to physically shift your viewpoint beyond your character sprites to simulate scoped zooming, which I thought was a really neat touch.

As usual, shooting game, so gotta talk about arsenal. Soldat leans pretty light on the fantasy elements, MOSTLY themed around real life weapons, and it does somewhat fall into the same "lots of machineguns that are just small variants of each other" trap that a lot of modern shooters suffer from, between the MP5, AK47 and Steyer AUG. But still goes wild enough with whatever it has left, with dual wielded Desert Eagles, a Ruger hunting rifle, a 40mm grenade launcher, a chainsaw and a goddamn XM214 Minigun, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. It honestly kinda astonishes me that you can put a minigun and a handgun in the same playing field and both will be relatively even balanced, even moreso because the game's arsenal is loadout based. Every respawn you pick a primary and secondary weapon, and both weapons will have infinite ammo save for reloads - the only pickups you find on the field are health and hand grenades. Which have the ability to... explode on impact with people for some reason, but I'm not complaining, it actually makes for some surprisingly hype plays when you're empty and don't have time to switch to a backup gun.

It's a simple multiplayer game through and through, but the bot support is fine enough that it's still a good game to relax and unwind with even on your own. The game has been updated over the years mostly for modern OS support, and has still remained completely free all the while - in fact, it even has a Steam listing now, with upscaled graphics so people's heads aren't just a 4 pixel blob anymore. For a game with no entrance fee, it's really hard not to recommend if you can coordinate a few mates together into a game, or sometimes even just as a time waster in its own right.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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